


Role Reversal

by texadian



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: BAMF Molly Hooper, F/M, undercover Mary and Molly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-18
Updated: 2016-05-18
Packaged: 2018-06-09 07:50:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6896449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/texadian/pseuds/texadian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For once, it is Molly who shows up at Sherlock's door late at night, slightly wounded and under the influence of endorphin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Role Reversal

**Author's Note:**

> An old prompt I found from last year that I never completed; Molly comes to Sherlock wounded from a case.

At approximately 9 o’clock in the evening, a woman came to the door of 221 Baker street. At approximately 9 o’clock and two minutes, the same woman knocked on the door to 221b and less than twenty seconds later, a man answered the door. The man was Sherlock Holmes and the woman was Molly Hooper, but something about the whole situation suggested otherwise.

“You’re hurt,” Sherlock said initially. His eyes flitted over her body, noticing every inconsistency with the Molly he’d come to know.

She was hurt, badly, but not horribly. The difference between these two distinctions is grey, so let me refine. She was in well enough shape to walk for ten minutes and take two cabs, but not up to swim the English channel nor have a restful night’s sleep. And while most of her injuries simply needed time to heal, a few did not, and this was where Sherlock came in.

“Yes. I am hurt.” She seemed quite pissed about the matter and addressed Sherlock as if it was entirely his fault. “If you would?”

He backed into his flat to let her in, then closed the door behind the both of them.

“Are you still in danger?” he asked, his back to her. “—myself of course assuming that your injuries are not by accident nor self inflicted.”

“You are correct.” She glanced down at her right arm. It looked like a sadistic tic-tac-toe set-up had gone to town on her skin. The cuts were mostly superficial, red streaks in long gashes where her blood had clotted. “And no, I don’t believe so. I went home after, then came here when I realized some of these were too difficult to mend myself.”

Sherlock hummed with a grim look upon his face. He paced the living room floor in front of her, swinging his dressing gown belt beside him. He stopped twice, as if to make a remark, before shaking his head and returning his gaze to an arbitrary spot ahead of him.

“Sherlock?” She stepped toward him, unconsciously bracing her right shoulder.

“You’ll stay here tonight,” he muttered, just loud enough for her to hear.

“Ok,” she agreed, trying to ease the tension.

“I’ll message Mycroft. Let him know what’s happened.”

“Wait.” Molly grabbed for his arm with her her left, but drew back when he spun quickly to face her. “There’s no need to message your brother.” She sort of laughed at the thought of it.

Sherlock didn’t find anything funny about it, though.

“Of course we will. If someone has attacked you, Molly…” An unsettling aggression took over his face. “I’ll put an end to it, with or without my brother.”

Molly sighed. She knew she would need to come out with the truth eventually, whether he liked it or not.

“There was reason for the attack, Sherlock.” She strayed from the entryway to the kitchen, casting her eyes over the cluttered table and countertops. “Mary and I —we—”

“Was this a bar fight?” He seemed to think the idea over, not minding the image forming in his brain.

“No, Sherlock. We didn’t get into a fight at a bar… On a Tuesday night… At 8 o’clock in the evening. We found the hackers group,” she replied bluntly.

In a heartbeat, Sherlock was in the kitchen, leaning over the other side of the table, eyes glued to Molly’s.

“The hackers case?”

“Yeah.”

“What… How? No.” He held his hand out in front of him, buffering. “You weren’t here for that.”

He ran through all of Molly and Mary’s visits in the past two weeks and came up with no overlap with the case. Just as he was about to ask, the answer came to him.

“John.”

Molly chuckled. “No, not John. Well, I suppose it is in part both of your faults.”

Sherlock peered back at her, confused.

“You left your case file on the couch last week, when you and John ditched us for three hours. We had to entertain ourselves somehow.”  
Sherlock still didn’t looked pleased. Whether from their actions or his own stupidity, was uncertain.

“So when we left, you what? Started reading through my things.”

“We —ow!” Molly cringed as her shrug sent pain to her shoulder. “We glanced through it a bit,” she tried continuing, clenching her teeth. The gesture was more than her shoulder could take at the time, so she went to his chair and sat down.

Behind her Sherlock released a heavy sigh and set about to find the first aid kit.

“We had no intention of intervening,” she supplied, watching him from the corner of her eye as he rounded up supplies. “It’s just, Mary overheard something at work, and with John gone for the week, we figured we’d check it out for you. We had no idea she was onto something.”

Sherlock, though present and fully in range to hear Molly’s words, did not; More so, he could not focus on the case details at the moment.

“Here,” he said, handing her an ibuprofen and a glass of water.

He followed round to the front and dragged John’s chair over to face her.

“How did you get these? he asked, ghosting his hand over the cuts on her arm first.

Molly twitched at his touch, but he did not cause her pain. There were abrasions on the outside of her forearm, almost like she’d fallen off a skateboard at high speeds.

Sherlock guided her arm out to rest on his knee before grabbing gauze and a disinfectant from the kit. He wouldn’t meet her eyes though, as he dabbed lightly at the area. Most of the cuts were almost painless, while others reacted strongly to the hydrogen peroxide. Molly inhaled sharply to those, causing her breath to hitch and her hand to twitch. It tapped out unorchestrated rhythms on Sherlock’s leg like a radioman using Morse code.

“These ones were just from the escape,” Molly told him. It did little to ease his stress, she realized, after the fact.

“Mm,” Sherlock replied with a faint nod. “Asphalt?” he wondered out loud.

“Roofing,” Molly replied, earning a sharp eyebrow raise from the man who’d thought he knew injuries like the back of his hand.

There was an uncomfortable silence as the two waited for the disinfectant to dry. Molly leaned down to blow air above the area in hopes of it drying faster, when Sherlock placed his finger to her lips. Molly’s eyes drifted upwards, while her body remained hunched over.

“Could infect it with any air pathogens,” he said meeting her gaze.

“Yes, you’re right.” She sat up in the chair, moving away from the finger that had silenced her and touched her own to her mouth with a discreet swipe of her hand.

“I still need to put the bandages on,” Sherlock said, inching forward in his chair.

Despite her decreasing endorphin levels, some of its effects still persisted. The subsided pain was a given, while other effects manifested in much different manners. Sherlock was by far the first to notice the other indications.

As Molly moved her arm for him this time, lowering it to his leg, it drifted higher than before and her thumb curled inward releasing pressure to his thigh. It felt as if all the blood had drained from his face and was sent elsewhere. He lifted her arm up from its resting spot as a distraction and feigned interest in the underside of her arm, when she curled back in pain once more.

“Moll—” He cleared his throat and tried again. “Molly!”

“Mm?” She drew her top lip under her bottom teeth and raised her brows in anxious anticipation.

“You’ve clearly bruised your shoulder, if not tore a muscle or worse…” Sherlock braced his head in his hands. “I understand that what you do is your business, but for my sanity and your wellness, what happened tonight?”

He could see her tongue running over her bottom teeth as she considered his question. Instead of answering, she pulled Mary’s phone from her pocket and handed it to him as if the action answered all his questions.

“Take a look,” she told him, hovering over the screen in his hands to direct him to the pictures Mary had taken at the school.

They were all close-ups, dimly lit, with the camera’s flash creating distortions to the image. Molly stood up and took a seat on the arm of Sherlock’s chair so she could get a better look for herself. She zoomed in on one, bracing her weight against him, and pointed to the fuzzy white stickers on what looked like a small computer server.

“The quality isn’t great, but Mary said they’re all here. All of the IPs you and John were looking for.”

“So it was a teacher? John was right?” Sherlock looked appalled.

“Not yet. He was thinking too old. They’re students —the hackers. The signature on all the hack jobs, it’s not a name, it’s an acronym. SAM: South Academy of Mathematics.”

Sherlock looked taken back. He fiddled with the bandages for Molly’s arm, struggling to peel back the sticky edges. 

“Don’t worry, it was Mary that figured that one out. She heard one of the other nurses bragging about her daughter getting into SAM. Of course, you were right about the case’s connection to the school system. ‘Cept it was the students. Four of them we think. We snuck into an information session for prospective students to gain access to the building and tracked down the servers’ location.”

“And you were attacked by these prepubescent computer geniuses?”

Molly kicked him in the shin. “They were like sixteen, Sherlock! And no, this,” she motioned to her arm, “was from fleeing the campus’s royal guard level security. I don’t think they got a good look at us —we split up on the 2nd floor— but my exit strategy could have been executed better.”

Sherlock nodded, putting the pieces together. He grabbed Molly’s hand again to steady her arm and covered the deeper cuts with Neosporin and padding. 

After, he rested his head on his hand and ran his fingers through his hair. “How’d you and Mary even get in there in the first place?”

Molly smirked. “I told you, they had an information session for prospective students… and their parents.”

Sherlock’s jaw went slack, giving Molly time to stand from the chair and make it to the kitchen before any questions were fired her way. She began rummaging through the drawers while Sherlock recovered.

“Do you have any dish towels?” Molly paused her search and cut across to his bedroom instead, leaving Sherlock to stew over the night’s events alone.

When she emerged with one of his t-shirts, Sherlock was way ahead of her, wrapping some ice in a hand towel. He snatched the shirt from her hands with a scowl and tucked it under his arm.

“Here, use this.” He handed her the homemade ice pack and walked back to replace the shirt, fingers crossed she’d found the right drawer on her first try.

“You might want to see a doctor if it’s still really painful to move in a few days,” Sherlock called out from the bedroom.

He sauntered out, wrapped up in a yawn, when he saw Molly’s dirt patched jumper on his living room floor. The owner was nowhere in sight. Sherlock cautiously looked around the area any other discarded items, unsure if he was pleased or upset when he saw none.

“I was just using the toilet,” Molly called from behind him, stepping out of the bathroom with his ice pack covering her camisole clad shoulder.

Sherlock turned to face her and murmured a quiet, “Oh.”

He felt foolish and couldn’t hide the awkwardness in his voice.

“So should we investigate this further?” he asked. “Maybe we can go down to the school as prospective parents while school’s in,” Sherlock suggested, rubbing the back of his neck.

Molly smiled, chuckling to herself. “I would, but I don’t want the school to think my child is the offspring of some adulteress. I mean, Mary and I’s relationship is still solid as ever.”

Sherlock took a step towards her and ran a thumb against the thin material of her shirt.

“Are you sure?” he tried, lowering his voice slyly.

Molly batted his hand away, but stepped closer.

“You can come along as the full time nanny if you want. It’s a fairly progressive school. What bright child isn’t getting in with Lesbian parents and a manny?”


End file.
